5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #1 "The Survival of the Bark Canoe"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy's Blog

This is the first post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3, 1975).

This superb piece chronicles McPhee’s one-hundred-and-fifty-mile canoe trip through the North Maine Woods in August, 1974. He travels with four others – Henri Vaillancourt, Vaillancourt’s friends Rick and Mike Blanchette, and McPhee’s friend Warren Elmer – in two bark canoes. The canoes were made by Vaillancourt, a young man in his mid-twenties, who is a master builder of bark canoes. 

The piece unfolds in twelve sections. In the first two, McPhee visits Vaillancourt at his home in Greenville, New Hampshire, and observes him building a canoe. Here’s his description of Vaillancourt shaping the stempiece, the part that establishes the profile of the bow or the stern:

He plunged the laminated end of the piece into a bucket of water and left it there for a while, and then he built up the fire with scraps from the floor. In a coffee can he brought water to a boil. He poured it slowly over the laminations, bathing them, bathing them again. Then he lifted the steaming cedar in two hands and bent it. The laminations slid upon one another and formed a curve. He pondered the curve. It was not enough of a curve, he decided. So he bent the piece a little more. “There’s an awful lot of it that’s just whim,” he said. “You vary the stempiece by whim.” He liked what he saw now, so he reached for a strip of basswood bark, tightly wound it around the curve in the cedar, and tied it off. The basswood bark was not temporary. It would stay there, and go into the canoe. Bow or stern, the straight and solid part of the stempiece would run down from the tip, them the laminated curve would sweep inward, establishing the character of the end – and thus, in large part, of the canoe itself.

I relish descriptions like that – descriptions of process. McPhee is a master of them. In his hands, they’re like prose poems. This piece features several of them.

In Vaillancourt’s yard, McPhee sees two completed canoes. He writes,

Their bark, smooth and taut, was of differing shades of brown, trellised with dark seams. I guess I had expected something a little rough, rippled, crude, asymmetrical. Their color was pleasing. Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable. In the sunlight of that cold November morning, they were the two most beautiful canoes I had ever seen. 

Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable – I love that line. As McPhee points out, Vaillancourt’s canoes are modeled on the canoes of the Malecites: 

So Henri Vaillancourt builds Malecite canoes. Before all other design factors, he cares most about the artistic appearance of the canoes he builds, and he thinks the best-looking were the canoes of the Malecites. The Malecites lived in New Brunswick and parts of Maine. Vaillancourt builds the Malecite St. John River Canoe and the Malecite St. Lawrence Canoe. He builds them with modifications though.

At the end of section two, Vaillancourt mentions that he’s planning a canoe trip in Maine – down the Penobscot River and on to the Allagash lakes. McPhee asks if he can go with him. Vaillancourt agrees, but adds a condition: “Bring your own food.” It’s a hint of another side of Vaillancourt, an unattractive side, one that emerges more fully on the trip and nearly ruins it.

True to form, McPhee doesn’t start his account of the canoe trip at the beginning. Instead, he plunges in, in medias res: “It is five-fifteen in the morning, August 12th, and Henri is up splitting wood.”

Incidentally, that mention of the date (August 12) is the only indication in the piece of when this trip occurred. There’s no mention of the year. The piece appeared in The New Yorker in two parts – February 24 and March 3, 1975. My guess is that the trip occurred in August of the previous year. This is consistent with what McPhee says about Vaillancourt’s age. He says that Vaillancourt built his first canoe in 1965, when he was fifteen, and that he’s “in his mid-twenties now.”

The crew put their canoes into the West Branch of the Penobscot River. They paddle down the Penobscot to Chesuncook Lake. They camp on Gero Island. The move north on the northernmost arm of Chesuncook Lake. They go up Umbazooksus Stream. They cross Umbazooksus Lake. They portage at Mud Pond Carry. They paddle the Allagash Lakes – Chamberlain, Eagle, Churchill – fighting the north wind all the way. 

Here's a taste of the group’s growing frustration with Vaillancourt, particularly with his insistence on pushing onward even though neither canoe is very good in heavy wind: 

We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups. We are struggling to get to the north end, about three miles away, and gambling that the wind will not rise to an even higher level before we are in the lee of the north-end woods. Why do we need these miles now? Why does Henri have this compulsion to move? Is he Patton? Sherman? Hannibal? How could he be, when the only regimentation he can tolerate is the kind he creates as he goes along? These are thoughts not composed in tranquility but driven into the mind by the frontal wind. Why do we defer to him? Why do we look to his decisions? Is it only because he made the canoes, because the assumption is that he knows what is best for them and knows what they can do and ought not to do? His judgment draws attention to itself, right enough. On the Penobscot River, he went “out for a spin” in heavy, gray dusk and was gone long after dark – much longer than he wished or intended. What was he doing? He was struggling to pick his way through boulders and up a set of minor rapids he could not see. A camper on the riverbank, that same day, asked him if his canoe was not too low in the freeboard for paddling on open lakes, and he said, “Not really. They don’t really ride low. You can design a canoe to do anything.” But here he is on Chamberlain Lake, bailing six inches of water from between his knees and whisking with his paddle, while Warren, like a tractor, pulls the canoe. A suspicion that has been growing comes out in the wind: Henri’s expertise stops in “the yard”; out here he is as green as his jerky.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. McPhee has a caustic side; it seldom appears in his writing. But once it’s triggered, as it is in this piece, watch out!  

Notice, in the above passage, McPhee’s use of the present tense (“We dig into the lake. We paddle and bail, bail and paddle – draining the bilge with drinking cups”) – one of his favorite techniques for conveying immediacy. It’s one of my favorite aspects of his writing.

The five men make it to the end of Chamberlain Lake. They portage half a mile to Eagle Lake. The wind and the white caps are even worse there than they were on Chamberlain. Their shore location is an ugly one – the junk-littered site of a former logging track. McPhee describes it:

Unfortunately, this is a bad place to spend a night, because the mechanized loggers gave it a century’s fouling and the century isn’t over yet. Rust is everywhere – rusty spikes, rusty hunks of the conveyor. To accommodate incoming logs, landfill was shoved into the lake, so the shore is artificial and swampy and strewn with boulders and still jagged with the corpses of water-killed trees.

They stay there and wait for the wind to decline. Three hours later, the wind seems to calm down. Vaillancourt decides it’s time to move. It’s at this point that disaster strikes. McPhee vividly describes the moment:

With everything aboard, the three of us prepare to step in. We do not know that two iron spikes set in timber, stand upright underwater, the tip of each less than an inch from the underside of the floating canoe. We step in, one at a time, and we give the canoe a shove. It does not move. Water spurts upward in fountains, fast enough to swamp us instantly. 

Jumping out, we shout to Henri. We unload the canoe, lift it ashore, and roll it over. Rick is struggling to his distress. His canoe, a treasure to him, has two ugly holes in it, large enough and ragged enough to make one wonder how it can continue the trip. Henri, examining the wounds, curses Rick for negligence, for irresponsibility, for failure as custodian of a bark canoe. Rick does not try to demur.

Now, all at once, Henri stops his harangue and changes utterly. The man who has been pouting, sucking grass, and cursing the wind all afternoon is suddenly someone else – is now, in a sense, back in his yard, his hands on a torn canoe. The lacerations are broad., and the bark around them is in flaps with separating layers. “Make a fire,” he says, and Warren and I off move off for wood. “Rick, Mike, get bark. Get strips of bark. A cut a green stick.”

Vaillancourt performs remarkable surgery on the canoe. McPhee describes his performance in detail. Here’s a sample:

It was now too dark for him to see. He calls for the flashlight, and I get it from my pack and shine it on the canoe as he works. He removes the pot from the fire and – with a flat stick – paints the entire damaged area with pitch while the Blanchettes, one at each end, hold the canoe level. Henri pulls out the tail of his shirt and cuts it off. It is broadcloth, and he cuts out of it a circular piece, which he presses down onto the pitch. Calling for the pot again, he paints on more pitch, until the cloth is completely covered. Then, as the pitch cools, he presses it repeatedly with his thumb, licking his thumb as he goes along to keep it from sticking. The finished patch is a black circle, about six inches in diameter. It is in the center of the bottom of the canoe. “At home I’ll cut an eye of bark and put a rim around it,” Henri says. “Then the patch, you know, will look better.”

The next morning, the men load their canoes and head out. The lake is calm. They’re almost across when the wind suddenly reappears. Waves rise quickly. McPhee writes,

Henri has begun to bail with exceptional vigor. His canoe is showing trouble – taking in more water than before. The land widens again to either side, and we move onto Churchill Lake, where the waves are as high and the wind as strong as they were at any time on Chamberlain. The lake inclines to the northeast, and the wind is quartering on us now. A thousand yards out, Henri turns to face it. He cannot take even the small amount of extra water that comes with quartering waves. His canoe is filling up. Racing a serious leak, he and Warren cut straight through the wind. Ahead of them is a strip of sand-and-pebble beach. Bailing as they go, they make it. We are two and a half hours, and nine miles, from breakfast – not bad against a rising head wind and with another sick canoe.

The leak is due to a flaw in the canoe’s construction: 

A longitudinal seam connecting two pieces of bark below the waterline has broken its sewing, and a gap has opened. When he made the canoe, he sewed that area too close to the edge of the bark, and the root stitching has now broken through to the edge. It is a wonder the canoe did not founder.

Again, Vaillancourt is able to make the repair. McPhee describes his procedure beautifully. Here’s an excerpt:

Henri takes a close look at the position of the break in the seam and is pleased to find that it is directly under a rib. “Good,” he says. “The repair won’t show.” And he taps the rib aside. His awls are at home, but he has picked up a nail somewhere, and he uses it now to bore holes through the planking and the bark. The root is soon moving through the planking and out through the bark and back again in a set of cobbler’s stitches – Henri reaching around the canoe, hugging it, to draw the sewing tight. He is sewing not only bark to bark (near the original seam) but also bark to planking, to give the repair increased authority. When the sewing is finished and tied off, bright sutures mar the planking, but Henri taps the rib back in, and – as he said it would – it completely hides the job.

The expedition continues via lake, portage, and stream to remote Allagash Lake. They paddle toward the lake’s south end. In one of my favorite passages of the piece, McPhee describes the scene:

On the water, in the post-dawn light, the canoes slide across a mirror so nearly perfect that the image could be inverted without loss of detail. The lake is absolutely still, and mist thickens its distance and subdues in gray its islands and circumvallate hills. Warren and Henri are perhaps a hundred feet farther out than we are, and appear to be gliding through the sky: Henri’s back straight, his hand moving forward on the grip of his paddle, his dark knitted cap on his head, his profile French and aquiline; Warren under the bright tumble of hair, his back bending. Their canoe was alive in the forest only months ago, and now on the lake it is a miracle of beauty, of form and symmetry, of dark interstitial seams in mottled abstractions of bark.

We’re in the final chapter of the piece now. It’s been quite a trip! And it’s not over yet. From Allagash Lake, the group has to go another twenty miles to get to the roadhead at Caucomgomoc Lake. Three of the twenty miles are grueling portage. Henri behaves miserably. He falls in the mud. He curses McPhee for failing to guide him. He’s terse and angry. On Caucomgomoc Lake, he plows his canoe directly into the waves. McPhee writes,

We round the last bend and swing into Caucomgomoc. It is two miles wide, and we have about six miles to go – to its far, northwestern corner. Coming directly at us across the lake are the highest waves we have seen yet, driven by a western wind. Henri, in his own drive for the finish, moves straight out onto the water and begins to plow headlong for the farther shore. His caution – what there was of it on Eagle and Chamberlain – is gone. To me, it seems a certainty that we are going to swamp, that we will complete the day with a long, slow swim, dragging the canoes to shore. I check my boots, my pack, to make sure they are firmly tied. I am ready to shrug and see what happens. Warren, however, is not. Having absorbed Henri in silence for something like a hundred and fifty miles, he now turns suddenly and shouts at the top of his lungs, “You God-damned lunatic, head for shore!” The canoes turn, and head for shore.

It's an unforgettable scene. Writing about it thirty-seven years later, in a piece titled “Editors & Publishers” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012), McPhee discloses that his description of the incident isn’t quite accurate. What Warren Elmer really said was “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” For the 1975 piece, to get it published in The New Yorker, edited at that time by the finicky William Shawn, McPhee had to tone down the profanity slightly.

My summary of “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” outlines the main stages of its journey, but fails to do justice to its artistry. The piece is structured like a bark canoe. The center thwart is the trip; the ribs are the many topics that McPhee touches on along the way, e.g., loons, Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, birch bark, the history of the fur trade, voyageurs, James Dickey’s Deliverance, deer, log-driving, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm’s The Penobscot Man, freeze-dried food. Here, for example, is his wonderful description of the cry of the loon:

But it is with another sound – a long cry in the still of the night – that the loon authenticates the northern lake. The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source – hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic, because it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the earth. The Crees believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chipewyans heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings – a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of McPhee’s best.